Idlewild
by Sabriel41
Summary: In their experience, diplomacy is just another word for acrobatics. [four takes on Yuffie and Rufus, from summer skin to summoned dragons]


**Idlewild**

**. o .**

Victor Shinra looked down at his son as the helicopter winged its way across the sky, mountains and pagodas becoming a smudge on the horizon. His son had just completed his first diplomatic voyage and walked amidst the towering spires and veiled complexities of Wutai quite well, Victor thought, though he would never say as much. Instead - "…and what do you think of the young Miss Kisaragi, Rufus?"

Tugging at the sleeves of his black turtleneck, Rufus looked up at his father with a scowl. "She's a baby, she's noisy, and she calls me _Ru-ru_. I wish she'd stop."

Allowing a rare smile to soften the hard lines of his face, Victor replied. "She'll forget the name in time, or she'll think better of it. A Shinra shouldn't let such things bother him." At his son's look of protest, he continued. "You _will_ have to bear with her, Rufus; the Kisaragi are a bothersome family, but a powerful and useful one all the same."

Victor frowned as he gazed back at the island through the windows of the helicopter, glad he had not decided to push the idea of an arranged union between the two heirs over his meetings with Godo Kisaragi. For now, economic ties had to be enough; it had been clear that the Wutaian leader had had enough of ties of blood, no matter their nature, and Shinra could afford to be a patient man.

Looking over to his son, he frowned as he noticed an arrogance already settling into his son's eyes and belying the innocently dimpled cheeks. The contrast in his boy's face was a hint of the wife whom he had never loved but had learned to respect and be very, very wary of. He wished his son many things, but among them was not a loveless marriage.

Rufus' frown matched his father's as the older man droned on about keeping the girl on his good side because an annoyed Kisaragi could be a dangerous enemy, and one that was notoriously hard to shake. Rufus would realize years later (after he had grown out his hair and she had cut hers and they had grown closer to filling the shoes of the scions they were born to be) that his father was right. She was like fate: only too glad to taunt and take up with those who tempted her.

But for now she was hardly a threat, precocious five-year-old that she was. Thus, more interested in his sketchbook and the smudged charcoal outlines of cities and coastlines therein, Rufus let his father's words wash over him. _She's just a girl_, he thought; _how much trouble can she be?_

_. o ._

Godo would only need to blink and she would grow, suddenly a wily-sweet ragamuffin who came to him with scratched knees and a hurt look as he sat in council. "Ru-ru teased me," she'd say, staring defiantly back at twelve-year-old and impeccable Rufus Shinra leaning smugly against the doorframe.

Shinra senior scolded his son with an amusement that Godo worried over. But his little girl could fight her own battles. A heartbeat later, and she'd tripped the young blond, sending him sprawling at his father's feet. Rufus glared up, pulled her down with him, and all matters of business were temporarily forgotten as the emissaries watched the tiny heirs of two very different empires wrestle on the tatami mats.

It was a childish war that ended well; as both children collapsed into laughter, Yuffie linked her arm through Rufus' and pulled the boy away from the 'boring' adults to plague the servants for treats and chocolates.

As he watched the pair leave, Godo thought it was a pity that the empires the duo were due to inherit were not so easy to appease.

_. o ._

_Well, shoot_, Yuffie thought.

It was with a measure of amusement that Yuffie realized when you intended to slide dramatically down against a wall, hands clamped over your headphones, and cry angrily over the seventeen-year-old who had just broken your heart, it was best to know if the length of your headphone cord makes the entire journey possible. _Nothing_, she scowled, could disrupt the stubborn melancholy of a good blue mood like being ripped out of her dismay by the sudden jolt as the cord reached its full extension.

As she tumbled the rest of the way to the floor, Yuffie's dark mood took a turn for the worse. _I hate him, hate him, **hate** him, the big jerk._ Ripping her headphones off, Yuffie hurled them across the room, blatantly disregarding the fact that the sudden eruption of bass and Continental dialect had likely jolted half the house out of their slumber. _Including him_, she thought with a wicked grin; he and his father had been given rooms on the lower floor, two and three rooms over if she remembered correctly. _Serves him right,_ she cursed, _who needs him and his sissy classical music anyways?_ Wiping tears away with the back of her hand, she luxuriated in the heavy drums and angry vocals as her shoulders shook.

She was happily cathartic until she remembered that the music was Shake's – she'd pilfered the disc from her instructor's training bag last week, attracted by the bright artwork on the case, and had meant to return it before he noticed it was missing. Shake's music anthology rivalled Gorki's collection of shuriken as far as size was concerned, and as such, Yuffie Logic had said that he wouldn't miss just one disc. Unfortunately, if the thundering footsteps from down the hall were any indication, Shake had just noticed. Yuffie pulled herself up and shut off the music, rooting through the cases until she found the right one and scrubbing angrily at any stray tears.

She was ready at his first knock. Opening the door only slightly, her slender arm curved around it and out into the hallway, holding the music like a peace offering. "Take it," she murmured, and softer, "Sorry about, um, waking you up... hey, hey, at least you liked the song, right? _Maaan_, Gorki's gonna kill me tomorrow."

Shake laughed, but he saw through her ploy. "Lady Yuffie, are you all – "

Leaning against the back of the door so that Shake could not see her at all, she sighed. She _was_ all right; she was also furious at the easy way Rufus had ignored and belittled her at the birthday celebration that her father had thrown earlier that night, all while maintaining a perfectly urbane exterior.

"I'll teach him to pat me on the head and call me a mere _child_ and I'll _never_ forgive him for what he said about Momma and –" Yuffie toyed with the blue and white scarf printed with a Mideelian floral pattern around her neck and scowled. _That stupid show-off; what sorta gift is this, anyway?_ She'd show him that his backwards ideas about a girl's place could go take a long walk off of the very top of Da Chao and that even though he was crazy rich and kinda cute and sort of politically invulnerable, she could still kick his ass in the only way that counted.

She'd just have to make sure that she wasn't within Godo's sight the next time she found it necessary to do so.

She would get even with him, even if it meant stealing all of the Main Continent's materia, 'cause both he and his dad sure seemed to be obsessed with it. She could understand their interest to a point – Materia _was_ shiny and wonderful and cool, but they turned it into their main energy source or something stupid and boring like that. A real waste, as far as she was concerned. So maybe she could hold all their Materia hostage and then Rufus would have to apologize and mean it this time, instead of flying in as he pleased in his helicopter with his pressed white suits and his sneer when her hometown showed its scars and its seams around the edges.

He had no right to say what he did. _None._ He had been fun, once – he had let her drag him around to where Yumiko would give them homemade sweets and chocolate bars shipped in from Junon in the kitchens and she had seen his eyes widen with wonder when they snuck past their fathers on her grand if highly unofficial tour of the Great Pagoda. But something had happened since; his eyes had gone cold and his suits never seemed to get a speck of dust on them anymore and his lip curled in an unpleasant way whenever their paths crossed. She hated that she loved him all the more for it.

But maybe if she stole his pride – his father's pride, but his, too; he was tied to his father and his father's dream as much as she was to her own – maybe she could get the old Rufus back. The Rufus whose smile had been always slight but present and who had toured her through the Turk Lounge where they had run amok, once, before being banned absolutely from its walls whenever they were together. She and Rufus had terrified the blue-suited team, save a bald and tanned Rookie Turk whose laugh rumbled as Yuffie had scrambled up his side and onto his shoulder to escape the wrath of another Turk whose coffee mug she'd knocked over accidentally. Rufus had smirked below her, secure enough in his place as heir apparent to safeguard him from the fact that he'd been the one to knock Yuffie into the desk the coffee mug had been on.

She missed that Rufus. _So really_, she thought, _that stealing-Materia plot isn't such a bad idea…_

"…Lady Yuffie?" Shake's voice persisted.

_Right._ "I'm fine, Shake," Yuffie replied. _Hey, maybe even better than fine._

Shake sighed. "All right, all right. We'll talk about taking things that aren't yours in the morning, then."

It was a testament to her brilliance, she decided, that her "mmhmm, good night" was chirpy and innocent. Shutting the door and locking it, Yuffie untied her hair from its elaborate updo and tossed all the pins and hair sticks across her washroom counter. Humming off-key, she brushed her teeth as her mind flew through clever plot after clever plot that would knock Rufus Alexander Shinra down a peg or ten.

Hair down and eyes flashing, she dashed to her bed, curled up, tugged her blankets over her shoulder, turned on her light and pulled out a small coil notebook with a wicked grin. Yuffie Ayame Kisaragi had some _serious_ planning to do.

_. o ._

Five years later, Rufus was wordlessly handed a message that was folded into the shape of what had been the Mideelian state flower. Rude, who had delivered it, looked relieved to rid himself of the girlish missive.

Rufus' visible eyebrow quirked as he unfolded the note. _Hey, blondie_, it read. _I heard you needed someone to come and save your ass._ A simple 'Y' was scrawled beneath the single line, and a rare smile crossed Rufus' lips. His smile disappeared at the postscript, which told him to keep his _eyes on the skies, Ru-ru._

"Ru-ru?" Reno gawked from where he had snuck up and been reading behind his boss' shoulder. "And she's still alive? Hell, she's still _in_ _one piece_?"

With a short sigh, Rufus spun his chair around to fix the laughing redhead with a blank look. "It was… a regrettable nickname from childhood. Miss Kisaragi has what I shall call an unusual sense of humour, and it would be best for you that you do not repeat her error, Reno. _Are_ we clear?"

"Crystal, Boss-Man."

Resisting the urge to glare and tell his rowdy subordinate to quit it with the nicknames altogether and get back to work, Rufus sighed; he'd learned how to pick his battles by now, and this was not one he was going to win. Ever. It was a pity, but…

Dismissing the black-suited pair from his office, Rufus rolled his chair towards the gaping vacancy of what once had been the room's exterior wall. If he guessed right (and he nearly always did) one of those silver-haired idiots, likely the whiny one, was due to come through the door right about now.

_Ah._

Right on time, then.

Idiot in, idiot dealt with. Said idiot having summoned some derivate of the Bahamut line over the city square, Rufus allowed himself to worry slightly, but Strife had agreed to help in his backwards, awkward-hero way, so... He was just about to wheel his chair around and head for a more fortified location when a flash of silver from above the maze of scaffolding caught his eye.

Squinting against the sun, he heard the whirr of Highwind's plane, and almost laughed as a parachute blossomed from its base and floated like a whirligig as a girlish figure guided it down through the maze of girders and scaffolding. An oversized shuriken with four points that flashed out at the summoned dragon confirmed the girl's identity; Yuffie had made good on her promise, for better or for worse. His eyes followed her acrobatics with amusement. Clearly, she had no sense of gravity, flinging herself off of the spindly metal girders the way that she did and flying into battle with reckless, focused speed.

As her shuriken landed a significant blow on the Summon, the collision of metal and magic sending off bright silver sparks, the thought crossed his mind that he was glad that her razor-keen focus and girlish brilliance was no longer turned against him and his. (And she _was_ still a girl, he thought - if only because even at nineteen, she still wore those ridiculous shorts.) Poor taste in clothing aside, however, she landed more hits than she missed, and showed no signs of tiring, holding her ground (such as it was) until Strife made it an one-on-one battle

When Rufus met her in passing a week later, his eyes widened as he recognized the pattern of her shirt, a cheerful blue and white floral print. Mideelian. One of a kind - he'd made certain of that before buying it on a day in November six years ago. Recognizing her peace offering for what it was, he caught her eye and nodded, sighing at her sudden laughter and jolting in surprise as Rude's chuckle rumbled from where the Turk had been walking behind him - clearly, the Turk had pieced the puzzle together as well.

Despite his scowl, Rufus didn't mind; he had learned that he would take Yuffie's laughter over the point of her shuriken any day of the week. _Particularly_ as he would never have to admit this fact aloud; the only person who could call him on it was ten feet under and _good riddance to the old bastard_, but bastard or not, Rufus had also learned that his father had been right about her all along.

_. o . _

( history is not always a broken record )

. o .

**.finis.**

_. o ._

_Sabe's Scribbles_: For the lovely and wonderful Jess Angel; _where did Kisaragi and Shinra Srs come from?_ but… it worked? I hope you liked it - this was really fun to write, and became hard to keep down to five pages, because once you get started with these two, they're hard to corral. No word of a lie I finished this on Word, then went to format it on LJ and added three paragraphs. I also love how Yuffie brings out the italics full-force. ...sadly, I know that bit about the headphones from experience.

Thoughts and concrit are always welcomed!

_Disclaimer:_ I don't own the characters or realm mentioned herein - all parts of FF7 belong to Square Enix.


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